Why This Alaskan Town Will Experience 64 Days of Darkness

In the town of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, the winters can be particularly brutal. The average temperature of the northernmost town in the U.S. in December rests below zero, and the city undergoes the unique experience of polar night—which for them is a period of more than 60 days of darkness when the residents live without daylight. Utqiaġvik Mayor Asisaun Toovak says that most days people don’t venture outside.

But that time of year is still the season she most looks forward to, as the town also has polar days, or 24-hour daylight, from May through about August. “Finally being able to go, okay, the sun's going down, [I’m] kind of looking forward to it. I feel that it's time for some good rest,” says Toovak. 

This year, Utqiaġvik will experience their final sunset of 2024 on Nov. 18. They won’t witness the sun again until Jan. 22, 2025. 

Polar night is best explained as a period where “the sun remains below the horizon for more than 24 hours,” says Jennifer Mercer, the arctic Sciences section head at the National Science Foundation. The phenomenon is caused by the Earth’s axial tilt of about 23.5 degrees. Polar nights occur in both poles during their winter months, in the northern hemisphere from September to March, and in the southern hemisphere from March to September. Alongside parts of Alaska–Canada, Greenland, Finland Norway, and Russia, also experience polar nights. Antarctica is the only place that experiences it in the southern hemisphere.

The further south or north you go, the longer polar night occurs. “In the South Pole, the season when the sun is up,” or daylight happens for 24 hours is about six months, Petrov says. By contrast, the Equator experiences 12 hours of daylight, with small variations, year-round. 

Since Utqiaġvik is located north of the Arctic Circle, it looks away from the sun. While the sun will not rise as it typically does for the rest of the Earth, it is not pitch black. What they experience during the day is twilight—when the sun is sitting just below the horizon.   

“Total darkness only occurs when the sun is below the horizon far enough that there is no twilight,” says Mercer. 

Toovak says that it still can be a bit bright during the day, and describes it more so as a permanent cloudiness. And when night does arrive, it becomes a great period to observe the Northern Lights, which were more visible this  year due to the sun reaching the peak of its magnetic cycle this October, per NASA. 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Leonid Petrov says the best way to visualize the reason behind polar night is to imagine the Earth as a ball that is rotating around the lamp. “What you will see is that one half of the ball is lit by the lamp, and another part of the ball is in permanent shadow,” he says. “In that case we would have daytime in one hemisphere and permanent light in another hemisphere.”

In Utqiaġvik—which boasts a population of less than 5,000 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—just over half of the population identifies as American Indian and Alaska native. Many families have been living in the town for generations, which Toovak says allows them to “thrive” during the long stretches of winter. 

When the sun does rise above the horizon for the first time again in January, though often for less than an hour, it's a period of celebration for the town. “Our college, the only tribal college in Alaska, they always do a celebration every year where they get singers, drummers, dancers, and do traditional dancing, what they call, the ‘welcome the sun back dance,’” says Toovak, speaking about the performance the Iḷisaġvik College puts on. “Seeing drumming and dancing in our traditional song and dance is very healing for people.”